This year, Queen’s College celebrates its 175th anniversary. It is one of the few functioning institutions to have survived here for this length of time, and the weight of that tradition is still apparent notwithstanding the vicissitudes to which the school has been subject in the more recent past. Even although today it has lost a good measure of the esprit de corps and scholasticism of its earlier years, QC, nevertheless, produces more than its fair share of Guyana’s outstanding performers, most probably because it attracts those with the highest marks at the Grade Six Assessments. One could well conceive that should at some point in the future the Ministry of Education decide to abolish streaming and with it the Grade Six Assessments, not a few parents outside the catchment area for QC would still try to secure a place for their children there; such is its reputation.
The standard history for the school, at least up to 1951, remains Norman E Cameron’s work, A History of the Queen’s College of British Guiana. As he records, Queen’s College Grammar School, as it was then known, opened on August 15, 1844 in Colony House, a building which was located in what is now the grounds of the High Court. It made several moves after that, including to what is now Quamina Street, and then in 1918 to Brickdam, being installed in the building which became the Ministry of Health.
Its final relocation to the present site took place in 1951, when a new structure was erected at a cost of half a million dollars. The central section of this building was razed by fire in an act of arson in 1997, destroying a part of the school’s institutional memory. The damaged portion has since been rebuilt.
QC’s founder was the Rev William Piercy Austin, the Anglican Bishop of what was then British Guiana. For all his religious background, the bishop appears to have been a man of a certain vision, assuring critics that the benefits of the school were open to all. He also wanted to institute scholarships to English universities which were available to students no matter their colour, race or creed.
That said, one of the arguments put forward in favour of the school was that it would keep the children of society’s wealthier classes – i.e. the Whites − in the colony so they would not be sent to England for schooling at an early age, and could therefore develop an interest in the country. In the earliest days, donors of £100 and more could nominate one scholar who could attend QC free of charge, and given the limited overall numbers attending the school, these, including ten chosen by the government, accounted for a noticeable proportion given the age. Among them, says Cameron, was L M ͗Kenzie, who was probably the first Black clergyman to be ordained in the then British Guiana in 1854. He had earlier been awarded a scholarship to study theology.
However, the number of exhibitions, or scholarships available were significantly reduced as the century progressed and eventually, at the end came to account for a very tiny percentage of the school roll. The general intake in due course increased, and the institution came to be viewed as a school for white boys, particularly during that period in the 1880s when no exhibitions were available to primary students. This exasperated the then headmaster, Exley Percival so much that he gave three exhibitions of his own. Such scholarships were not restored until 1894, although even then, the numbers remained very small until the PPP came briefly to office in 1953, and then Minister of Education Forbes Burnham increased them to over 100.
Cameron was of the view that the curriculum of QC from its inception was practical, since it comprised two departments, namely classical and commercial, the latter intended for those who were going into business. This feature, he said, remained until the government took over the school in 1876. It might be mentioned that not everyone in the colony was enamoured of the educational arrangements. In 1853 in the Combined Court (the assembly dominated by the plantocracy), one speaker complained that there was “too much classicality and too little learning.” In a dig at the locally based Scots, he said they “boasted of their little bit of Latin and Greek and could hardly speak their own language,” a remark which produced great hilarity in the Court.
The author also quotes the Chief Justice as displaying a very progressive attitude in the Court for the period. He said, “The State ought to encourage in the poor as well as in the higher orders ambition of obtaining an education that would raise them to the position of judges and legislators.” QC was certainly to do that in due course. It was also progressive for its time in the sense that it introduced science at the end of the nineteenth century, although for a good while the boys had to use the government laboratory for their experiments, because the school did not have one of its own.
If Cameron had a favourite early headmaster, it would seem to be Percival, who was headmaster for 16 years from 1877. He set a high scholastic standard, and QC, at one point, was second only to Liverpool College in the pass lists throughout what was then the Empire. He also set great store by discipline and homework, and was of the opinion that there should be a girl’s school along the lines of QC and an intermediate school in New Amsterdam. A believer in education for all age groups, he was a proponent of adult evening classes. In an anecdote reminiscent of some schoolboy story of an earlier era, the author relates how on his deathbed on March 5, 1893, Percival’s last words were, “Carry on, boys.”
Since Independence, QC has come under more direct pressure from the political directorate. While Burnham opened it up in 1953, he undermined it from the 1970s onwards. Since the Prime Minister failed to persuade Headmaster Clement Yhap to change the school’s name or the colonial symbol on its badge, QC was no longer an institution which found favour with him. In 1974, the Ministry of Education began taking over its building at four o’clock, when the boys normally played table tennis or other games, or did their homework while waiting to be collected by parents. It produced perhaps the nearest thing to a ‘strike’ on the part of the students that the school has ever seen, although since it was almost the end of the school year, it was not sustained.
During a period of turmoil at the end of the 1970s which extended into 1980, the headmistress of St Rose’s came under pressure from the government, and she was eventually interdicted. A new association of head teachers encompassing, in particular, the senior secondary schools, caused the political administration to transfer the headmaster of QC, Clarence Trotz, out of the school to St Stanislaus College.
QC lost many of its best teachers, as did the rest of the education system from the 1970s onwards, because Burnham undercut their professionalism, requiring them, among other things, to take children out onto the streets to wave flags at visiting dignitaries and the like, and have them participate in a march-past down Brickdam, for example, to celebrate the anniversary of his entry into Parliament. The absence of almost all the Queens’ students on that occasion was said to have irked Burnham, more especially as they belonged to his old school. There was too the deeply unpopular Mass Games.
If Guyana has a teaching crisis now, part of it is an inheritance from the years when educators decamped in significant numbers to teach in the Caribbean, in particular, because of the erosion of their professionalism, the loss of respect they had experienced, and, it must be added, the economic situation. Those legacies have not been reversed.
QC of course became co-educational in 1975, without much warning, after Burnham invited boys who wanted to interview him for the school magazine up to Belfield towards the end of the final term. They asked him when girls would be allowed in the school, and the Prime Minister replied that the senior secondary schools would be integrated for the new school year. There had been an earlier attempt in July 1973, when then Minister of Education Shirley Field-Ridley invited the five senior school heads to her office to discuss implementation for the following term. They all said it would require far more time to arrange, and Carmen Jarvis’s particularly strong objections (she was headmistress of Bishops’ High School) were accepted by Field-Ridley.
For all the difficulties it has endured, QC has survived. While bringing every secondary school up to the standard of the senior secondary institutions is a commendable objective, that should not involve degrading the latter. Queen’s belongs not just to those who attended it, taught there, or have some other connection, but to the entire society. In a country where everything seems so transient, the school has shown its resilience, has embedded itself in the psyche of the nation and still does that for which it was created – produce scholars.
